By the dawn of the Summer of Love, Marin had already longbeen a zone of playful weirdness and cultural ferment — itsown, if more diffuse, epicenter.

“As I look back at Magic Mountain, I get a feeling offreshness,” says Jack Casady, then the bassist for JeffersonAirplane. “There were a lot of people up there on that moun-taintop, a lot of variety of acts. It was exciting stuff.”In some ways, Magic Mountain represented the culmi-nation of an era rather than the launching of a new one; itwould be among the last of the freewheeling hometown gigsfor bands like the Airplane, which was ascending to cruisingaltitude just as the counterculture was heading further intothe mainstream. “As soon as we finished playing, we jumpedoffstage and wandered into the crowd to watch the nextact like other people would,” Casady says. By the followingweekend at Monterey, “it got to where you couldn’t do that.”But for Casady, as for many who were there, MagicMountain wasn’t a watershed cultural moment. “We weren’tall thinking, ‘ Well, this is a major-level change’ like whenwe played Woodstock, which was beyond anything else,” hesays. “At the time we saw it as pretty cool, it worked out greatand it was a way to open up and identify with more people.”One of those people was photographer Elaine Mayes,who was then living off Panoramic Highway on MountTamalpais. She’d bummed a ride up to the CushingMemorial Amphitheatre on the back of Hugh Masekela’smotorcycle (Masekela had come to perform with The Byrds)mainly to photograph the event, as she’d been documentingthe Haight for a couple of years prior.

“There were kids sliding down the hill on cardboard.People selling trinkets and incense, painting faces, allkinds of people in the woods smoking pot — that was themost amazing thing,” she recalls. “There were cops every-where, and nobody paid any attention. That had neverhappened before.”That openness and freedom proved a boon to the youngphotographer. “I photographed Jim Morrison twice; youcould get very close to anyone you wanted because there’dnever been a festival like that before.” Like Casady, Mayesdidn’t think of Magic Mountain as particularly momentous.“It was part of a process,” she reflects, “the culture was mov-ing, and I was moving with it, following it with my camera.”A week later, Mayes photographed Monterey Pop; thoseimages were published in her 2002 volume It Happened inMonterey, after languishing for decades in an archive. Asfor the images of Magic Mountain? They, too, perhaps are atreasure waiting to be rediscovered. “I have no idea wherethey are,” she says.

For Anna Halprin, the Summer of Love and the counter-culture revolution dovetailed with the work she’d been doing